In 2004, Facebook paved a new way for people to form communities and post narratives of their lives in words and photos. For gardeners, social networks are taking a practical twist: allowing them to peer over the virtual fence and see how someone built raised beds for their bok choy and beets, or sort out how tough it is to grow that New Zealand native evergreen astelia in their garden.

Such sites have sprouted up all over the Internet. With the Bay Area being fertile ground for both gardening and social networking, we checked out three recent home-grown arrivals.

YourGardenShow.com

Tom Finerty, Emmy Award-winning television producer-director, and his wife, Lisa Marini Finerty, a master gardener and community gardening activist, launched YourGardenShow.com in April 2010. Tom Finerty said his original vision was to create a "site for gardeners, a public face board." What he found is "they didn't want to talk about themselves, but you couldn't get them to stop talking about their garden." So he "put their garden face forward."

Favorite features: Glog (garden log), a contemporary riff on the Farmer's Almanac, is part of the Citizen Science platform. "Shared information in a social media setting," Finerty points out, "is devalued over time, but the opposite is true with garden data." In this interactive timeline, gardeners record and track their garden over seasons and years, and share it with the community. The Citizen Science feature includes a partnership with San Francisco State University's Great Sunflower Project, which tracks honeybee populations.

A plant database, powered by the Missouri Botanical Garden and Cornell University, offers valuable basic plant information, such as light and water needs, USDA hardiness zone (though for California gardeners, nothing beats the more nuanced garden zones of the Sunset Western Garden Book) along with cultivation tips such as pH preference. Plant photos make for easy identification in the garden or nursery.

What we missed: Lacks how-to-build yard information. While the plant database is substantial, it is out of St. Louis and upstate New York, where plant palettes aren't as extensive as in California, so a search for astelia and Chilean bellflower (Lapageria rosea), both tender plants that grow well in the Bay Area, turned up empty.

The Garden Geek

What started as Patrick Albin's personal blog to share garden and plant photos with friends and family has grown since 2007 into an online community garden site. People with a common gardening interest can connect and share tips and information. A member of the California Horticultural Society, Albin, 47, lives with his wife and child in Oakland. "This is the way I learned to garden," he says.

Favorite features: The Plant Wiki, an interactive repository of information on individual plants, is modeled on a combination of Facebook and the online Wikipedia encyclopedia. Its initial database came from the USDA, its sponsor, with member contributions adding to it. Trade List lets members share extra plants, cuttings and seeds with other gardeners.

What we missed: Plant Wiki nicely lists plants suited for your garden zone, but despite the scope of its entries, did not list astelia, hellebores (Lenten rose) or lapageria (Chilean bellflower), plants well suited for California gardens. Some member will need to enter these into the Plant Wiki. Little practical information is found on how to build hardscape or construction projects needed in a yard.

YardShare.com

When Castro Valley homeowner Bryan Powell, 32, tore out his backyard to build a new outdoor kitchen and patio, he searched in vain on the Internet for how-to-build ideas supported by photos. Frustrated, Powell "bought a coding book, taught myself how to do it and built the site." He launched YardShare.com in February 2008. On his site, "a Facebook for yards, more about the yards than the people," members can share their backyard ideas, ask questions and click on a portfolio of more than 12,000 photos to get inspired. The site also features garden contests judge by members.

Favorite features: In the Yard Ideas section, the YardShare.com crew posts a daily article based on yards already on site. A recent feature on cutting gardens brought together pictures with text, telling members how to do it. In the Yard Experts section, landscape professionals submit photos that show projects from start to finish.

A recent development: Some members turn to one another for help by posting pictures of their torn-up backyards and asking for advice. "It is premised on the pictures," Powell said, the lifeline of this site. "You need to submit pictures to get help."

What we missed: Photos are the prominent feature. There's little information on plants, plant needs or care. The large picture database needs ordering and refinement to make it more accessible.